That is one awesome climb. The exposed fresh air traverse and standing on that prow just before the summit will knoock your fantsy shoes. Double Dihedral, not sure where that is or which route we ended up on, you've got choices.

Nurse Ratchet and I tried it this past summer. Hard steep snow to get to the first pitch. We had 6-point crampons and an axe apiece, had to belay the snow, coulda used 12-points and real tools. Once we got to the base of the first pitch it was an ice-filled chimney.

From the base of the first pitch we traversed left out to the sunny, warm North Arete. Followed that for a few pitches. traversed back to the base of the upper of the Double Dihedrals. Back to North arete.

Dingus... "a few wide pieces"... HA! that last pitch in the corner is solid wide for almost 100 feet.

DD is a cold route. We were there August 11-12 '06. It never saw the sun and it was way too snowy and way to cold. Might be better this next year with the '07 drought underway. But were I to try it again I'd schedule my climb in early September in hopes for less ice.

Notice that even in Tar's photo there is a steep snow approach to the first pitch, and if you look close you can see the ice-choked chimney above.

So a friend of mine and I wanted some adventurous climbing. Started from trail-head at 4am. We did some kind of a mix starting somewhere on the N. Arete without a topo. Climbing at first felt a bit harder than supposed to, I guess we were a bit off 'route.' Than we climbed over and ended up bellow the last few pitches of Double Dihedral. The big/wide dihedral pitch looked really good and it was my lead. The only problem was that my biggest cam was a 2.5inch mastercam LOL. I took it a step at a time and was able to sling couple of dirty chock stones in that dihedral. It was exciting. I remember my friend saying "seems like nutjob climbing." A bit past the second chock stone you could actually put gear in and climbing eases off. Another cruxy section at the top but well protected. Than you end up in a notch with a headwall. There was a rap station to get to 4th class gully. Instead I led up the headwall, which again was exciting. By the time you get first good pro in you are way up there. Wasn't hard climbing but I was careful to test every feature on the face since some of them could break off. Than we traversed to Dragtooth and Doodad after. The Teeth looked a bit nuts...

PS: Bring bigger pieces if you want to climb DD. I bet it will feel a lot better if you do : )

Interestingly enough, I was the leader of the party below you, Vitaliy M. The last Pitch of North Arete is way fun and you don't need big gear, also you get to traverse out to the main arete at the end for an awesome finish. What are the New (looking) rap stations there for? saw one at the top, and one on the double dihedral ledge.

I was talking about wide dihedral we climbed (finish of Double Dihedral route), not the North Arete finish (have not climbed that yet, but probably will some day). We saw a rap station when we topped our dihedral. I guess it is to avoid the head-wall. I did not see any other rap stations after that.

Nice running into other people. Usually we would stop and chat a bit, but we wanted to get to Doodad...